Gary Bauer: GOP Must Stand Up to Courts on Gay Marriage

Republicans must stand up to courts whose decisions on gay marriage fly in the face of Americans' values, says Gary Bauer, president of American Values.

"If America is now a country where the opinion of the people means nothing — where the opinion of the people and the votes of the people can be struck down by a handful of judges — then we are in deep trouble indeed,'' Bauer told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.

Bauer's declaration came hours after the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver ruled Wednesday that states cannot bar same-sex marriages.

The ruling overturned Utah's voter-approved ban against the ceremonies and came a year after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down part of a federal law denying benefits to gay and lesbian couples.

Bauer — a onetime GOP presidential candidate whose Virginia-based non-profit is "committed to uniting the American people around the vision of our Founding Fathers'' — is disheartened that Republicans aren't making more noise.

"It is demoralizing to see how few Republicans are willing to publicly show their outrage about these kinds of decisions, and by the way, to my friends in the business community who think they don't have any kind of a stake in this,'' he said.

"If judges can strike down these votes, if judges can tell Americans that their votes on these matters have no weight, does the business community think that those judges won't authorize more regulation of big business, more laws passed that will hurt big business?

"We should be in all this together, but a large portion of the conservative coalition increasingly is unwilling to speak up in defense of the values of social-issue voters who are the largest part of the overall conservative coalition.''